A study investigated dialect change in a southern Netherlands city, where the dialect spoken is distant from Dutch in phonology, morphology, and lexicon. The dialect is commonly spoken in the city of Maastricht, and is not restricted to one social class. Subjects were 64 native inhabitants of Maastricht from three generations: older (over 55…

The properties of presupposition were investigated in Japanese and English. The investigation examined how the presupposition is preserved under different syntactic structures, and identified presupposition in terms of the transitivity of factive verbs. Japanese was seen as more clearly manifesting "presuppositionability" than English in…

Structures in which nouns modify nouns have raised questions about the form and functioning of generative grammars. By applying and extending Jackendoff's X-bar theory of phrase structure, the syntactic properties of two types of pre-noun modifiers, adjectives and nouns, can be examined. X-bar analysis correctly predicts many features of noun-noun…

To determine the utility of the commonly taught phonics rule "if the only vowel in a word is at the end of that word, it usually stands for a long sound," a study evaluated all of the single syllable entries in the "New Grolier Webster International Dictionary of the English Language." When the letter "y" was considered a vowel, 72 words were…

To determine the usefulness of two commonly taught phonics rules concerning the pronounciation of two-syllable words, a study analyzed more than 138,000 words in the "New Grolier Webster International Dictionary of the English Language." The rules state that (1) a vowel is short when the only vowel in a syllable is not the last letter in…

This study was designed to answer the following three questions: (1) Are infants' first words always context-bound when they are initially acquired? (2) Do mothers use infants' first words in a context-bound manner when interacting with their infants? (3) What relationship, if any, exists between infants' initial use of early words and mothers'…

Applied linguistics, like language teaching, is in a state of disarray. It has been caught in the turmoil associated with the downfall of the theoretical model and the rise of several others. It is no longer identified solely with language teaching, but has begun to explore the solution of language problems in nonformal educational settings and…

An analysis of the Dinka (Sudan) vowel system consists of: (1) an overview of Dinka phonological structure, including the phonological sentence, the phonological word, the syllable, and the consonantal and vocalic features of the sound system; (2) an examination of breathy versus nonbreathy vowels, including a review of previous research using a…

A study investigated the range of articulatory patterns in French in which occlusive consonants are followed by anterior vowels, and the resulting acoustic phenomena. Articulatory factors examined include the place of articulation of the occlusive consonant; the nature of contact during the occlusion; articulatory movements at the consonants'…

A study examined whether children increased their vocabularies as a result of hearing unfamiliar words within the oral context of a story and observed the oral strategies the children employed as they attempted to define a new word. Subjects, 64 males and 64 females, were from self-contained third-grade classrooms in public schools in a small town…

A study investigating the independence of linguistic abilities from each other, specifically the separability of syntax and semantics and the autonomy of syntactic abilities, is described. In the study, 30 individuals with Alzheimer's disease produced spontaneous conversations, completed sentences eliciting 16 grammatical forms, and when possible,…

This study investigates the influence on sentence encoding of activating appropriate contextual knowledge. A group of 72 undergraduate students randomly assigned to four treatment groups read and were later asked to recognize sentences from a passage. In one group, subjects were told nothing about the passage from which the sentence was taken. In…

Notes from a diary kept on the language acquisition of a child from age 11 to 22 months, through four developmental stages, were used to investigate the interaction between the child's phonological systems and his developing syntactic system in the context of research on the emergence of multiword combinations. The presence of a phonological…

A collection of three papers written at a workshop on discourse grammar in Philippine languages is presented. The aims of the workshop were to (1) focus on discourse level grammar in the languages studied; (2) identify contrastive discourse types (genre) in the surface grammar; (3) identify the semantic constructions encoded by the different…

A lexical representational analysis of Classical Arabic is proposed that captures a generalization that McCarthy's (1979, 1981) autosegmental analysis misses, namely that idiosyncratic characteristics of the derivational binyanim in Arabic are lexical, not morphological. This analysis captures that generalization by treating all the idiosyncracies…